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Board governance topics have come up a lot for me lately, and I’ve been reading a veritable flood of books and papers on the subject. Two things have occurred to me: first, board governance authors seem to write in either overly academic language, or they try to dumb things down to the point of patronizing. As a language and writing nerd, this bothers me.

The second and much more important thing that I have observed is how prescriptive each model or expert seems to be about the role of the Board. The Board’s role is either to create the strategic plan, OR it is NOT to create strategy but rather oversee and approve it. Huh? Whether you look at working boards, policy boards, Policy Governance boards, or whatever model you want to dredge up, there are differing but very definitive prescriptions for how Board members are to connect (or not connect) with staff, leadership and customers.

Frankly I’m getting kind of tired of the back-and-forth… makes me feel like I’m trying to decide whether or not a glass of red wine is good for me. (I usually decide on “yes”).

I’m beginning to feel that Boards should build their own governance model based on the age & stage of their organization, the personalities and skills of the people involved, and the needs of stakeholders. Don’t forget the operating context either. There are so many factors that are at play in determining whether a Board using XX Board Model Trend Of The Year can be successful in helping an organization move forward and be useful.

This reminds me of one of my favourite facilitation questions when people are trying to make a decision: “What would be most useful in helping us move forward?” The other relevant question is “What is likely to actually work given our situation and resources?”

The long and short of it is, I believe, Boards need to design themselves. Use the best practices out there, but take no model at face value.

As the old adage goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” This is entirely true for almost every human endeavour we can imagine, and it gives rise to a healthy discussion around what one measures.

In business school, my management accounting professor told us a cautionary tale of a city works department that began measuring the amount of asphalt used by their pothole-fixing-crews as a way of checking on how productive the crews were being. My professor, who at one time had been a shovel-wielding road crew member, asked us to imagine what kinds of results that measurement would have. Did more potholes get fixed when asphalt use went up? Nope… but the holes dug on each pothole got deeper. Be careful what you ask for, was the moral of the story to our class of budding managers.

If measurement is such a key part of managing, in the for-profit or not-for-profit sectors, how do we do it well, so that we encourage the intended outcome? And how do we measure things without putting a load of bureaucratic nonsense in the way of getting things done? Read on for a few thoughts about this. read more…

One of the central tasks of strategic planning is to define the mission for your organization. It is not quite Mission: Impossible but I hope that I don’t scare off new readers by reassuring all of you who have struggled with this that defining the mission is not for the faint of heart.

Definitions of the “mission statement” abound. Some people use a slogan or tagline and call it their mission statement. Some marketing communications experts would like your mission to be snappy and appealing. The entirely left-brained among us want the mission to be as concrete as possible, preferably without requiring a philosophical “fuzzy” dialogue (fortunately there are not too many of those folks).

Some criteria for a good mission statement:

1. It should provide a focus and direction for the organization.
2. It should make clear what client group the organization serves.
3. It should make clear what needs the organization serves for that client group.
4. It should be clearly understandable – as a litmus test, a new staff person or volunteer might be asked “does this tell you what we do?”
5. It should express the organization’s purpose.

A mission statement needs to be succinct. If it is full of “this and that”, then the crafters of the statement have not done the work required to truly focus. The statement should also not be so vague that it could apply to other organizations in your space.

Focus your mission statement for the near and mid-term future. Allow your vision statement to express what change you wish to bring about through your actions. Let your values describe how you conduct yourself.

Coming up with this statement is NOT easy, let me tell you! But it helps to have everybody on the same page about what kind of statement you’re working on, so you’re all reaching for the same gold ring.

5) It has become synonymous with flakey team-building activities.

How many times do you need to fall backwards into your co-workers’ arms in this life? Well… never, actually. Unfortunately, the idea of getting away from the office for a planning day with your staff conjures up all kinds of lame stereotypes about “wilderness weekends” and “trust walks.” The good news is that strategic planning doesn’t actually involve any of that stuff. It’s extremely focused in reality. No fluff. Focus on what you want to do, and what’s got to be done to get there. Get everybody’s agreement on a set of measurements for success, and lay out your actions so you can keep each other accountable. No kum-bai-yah.

4) Nobody needs another vision statement on a coffee mug.

In giant corporate businesses, “visioning” can take days because many senior VPs have to agree on the direction. Then it gets printed on coffee mugs so nobody forgets, because the business is so huge that’s the best way to get the message out. In your small business or non-profit organization, the vision is pretty cut & dried usually: be reasonably financially sustainable doing what you’re good at (and in the non-profit world, doing what makes a positive impact). Once you’ve got that articulated, move on to how you’re going to get there. As for communicating, leave people’s coffee mugs out of it. Just sit down with them and talk about it. No need for fanfares or slogans.

3) We’re in a growth phase right now, so there’s no point in planning.

So… you’re going to launch a rocket and you haven’t decided what to point it at? When people talk about being in a growth phase as an excuse not to plan, I wonder, and I worry, how they know whether they’re going to be profitable or sustainable at the end of the growth. How are they sure they’re going to be able to keep it up at their new pace? Doing
growth without a plan is really flying by the seat of your pants: you’d better have a darn good tailor. A strategic plan doesn’t require you to stop everything or put your growth on hold. The only wrong way to do a plan is not to plan at all.

2) We don’t know how to do strategic planning, and it sounds pretty academic to me.

Yep, there are lots of high-falutin’ buzzwords and noble concepts in the field of strategic planning, I’ll give you that. Some people prefer to steer clear of things they don’t know how to do because, let’s face it, we’re all learning at the speed of light just trying to keep the show going. Imagine, though, how you got by in your work in the early days when you didn’t know the efficient ways of working. Did you have someone show you the ropes? You had to learn it, but after you did, it became second nature. There are lots of people out
there – and lots of videos online for free – that can help you learn about strategic planning so you can be more efficient at leading your business.

1) We’re too busy to stop for strategic planning.

This is by far the most frequent complaint of all business owners or non-profit leaders.
I’ll confess, I’m often so busy I’d rather just keep my head down and do what I know will make me money. Alas, you can spend a lot of years with your head down, making money, but when you finally stop to look around (maybe 15 years later) will you like where you find yourself?

Be busy going somewhere meaningful: profit on its own is no motivator for the human soul. When you get to the end of your life, do you want to say “I worked so hard and I ended up where I planned to be” or “I worked so hard – how did I end up here?” Strategic planning helps you make sure you’re going to have something of value in the future - something you can sell, pass on to family or trusted employees, or just ride into the sunset with an honourable legacy.

Bonus: The # 1 AAA Reason People Don’t Do Strategic Planning — We Don’t Have The Money!

This applies in different ways to non-profits and small businesses.

The funding environment for non-profits is extremely harsh these days, and even healthy organizations have a hard time justifying more overhead for planning. Especially when donors are looking at your overhead ratios and the newspapers seem to lynch anybody who spends more than 1% of their funds raised on anything other than programs (okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point). Yes – I get it – it’s VERY hard to allocate funds to strategic planning.

But here is the thing: examining your organization’s impact – not just its programs delivered but what they actually achieve out there in the world – is at the very heart of strategic planning. When you know what impact you seek to have (and are successful at having), it becomes ever so much easier to communicate a compelling reason for donors/funders to support you.

What if you could spend $2500-$5000 once every two to three years, and become 25% more successful on your grant proposals because you can tell the story of your organization better? Does that look like good ROI to you? Then what if that same $2500-$5000 provided a guideline for how to use your scarce resources to magnify and leverage your impact on your clients, by knowing what programs, equipment, etc. is most relevant to your goals?

For small businesses, a strategic planning project may seem like an unnecessary luxury. It *is* if all you do is navel-gaze and come up with a pretty mission statement. *shudder* What should happen is the “directional” stuff about mission and goals should get hammered out right away – quickly, neatly – and then you should move on to discussing how to make that mission come to life, by prioritizing your actions and making people accountable for results. A budget and some operations manuals usually follow. The cost of planning varies from business to business (it’s in the $2500-10,000 ballpark) but the point is, it’s not meant to be a cost that just sits on your overhead and does nothing. You use strategic planning to make good decisions, avoid bad decisions, and make everybody work together more effectively. For each business, the financial impact will be different but the more people you have to get working together in a coordinated fashion, the more important it is to have a plan to pull it all together.

No more using lack of money as an excuse, folks.

I’m going to be writing in the next few weeks about measuring and planning for impact, because I’m doing a lot of reading and thinking about it. For non-profits, don’t let this common reason to avoid strategic planning stand between you and the opportunity to really improve your impact.